by F. R. Leavis
It was in vain that he tried to control his attention, by directing it to any business occupation or train of thought; it rode at anchor by the haunting topic, and would hold to no other idea. As though a criminal should be chained in a stationary boat on a clear deep river, condemned, whatever countless leagues of water flowed past him, to see the body of the fellow-creature he had drowned lying at the bottom, immovable and unchangeable, except as the eddies made it broad or long, now expanding, now contracting, its terrible lineaments; so Arthur, below the shifting current of transparent thoughts and fancies which were gone and succeeded by others as soon as come, saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its place, the one subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid himself of, and that he could not fly from…. It was like the oppression of a dream, to believe that shame and exposure were impending over her and his father’s memory …
It is a developed formal simile, but a simile that has the swift directness of effect of the most spontaneous metaphor.
To take a different kind of manifestation of the same poetic gift, this is dramatic speech at a moment of crisis:
Mrs Clennam stood still for an instant, at the height of her rapid haste, saying in stern amazement:
‘Kept here? She has been dead a score of years or more. Ask Flintwinch – ask him. They can both tell you that she died when Arthur went abroad.’
‘So much the worse,’ said Affery with a shiver, ‘for she haunts the house, then. Who else rustles about it, making signals by dropping dust so softly? Who else comes, and goes, and marks the walls with long crooked touches, when we are all abed? Who else holds the door sometimes? But don’t go out – don’t go out! Mistress, you’ll die in the street!’
Affery resumes here, with the attendant uncanny reverberations and feelings and apprehensions, the warning signs (as they turn out to be) that portend the collapse of the house. Our acquaintance with that shored-up structure, the inmates and the inner gloom –
At the heart of it his mother presided, inflexible of face, indomitable of will, and austerely opposing herself to the great final secret of all life.
– is associated with these disturbing monitions, coming to us in the force of Dickens’s prose with the immediacy of actual sensations, and having in terms of the symbolic significance a charging effect (the symbolism works as immediately as metaphor) that there is no need to enlarge upon.
There had been nothing like this poetic power of the great novelist’s prose since Shakespeare’s blank verse. A power that has of its nature such diverse manifestations forbids any offer to do it justice by assembling examples. It is a condition – this is my point at the moment – of the flexibility of Dickens’s art; of his ability to bring together in the service of one complex communication such a diversity of tones and modes. I will allow myself one more illustration.
Mr Merdle, making an apparently bored and pointless call on the Sparklers, borrows, as he gets up to go, a pen-knife:
‘Tortoise-shell?’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes, I think I should prefer tortoise-shell.’
Edmund accordingly received instructions to open the tortoise-shell box, and give Mr Merdle the tortoise-shell knife. On his doing so, his wife said to the master-spirit, graciously:
‘I will forgive you, if you ink it!’
‘I’ll undertake not to ink it,’ said Mr Merdle.
The illustrious visitor then put out his coat-cuff, and for a moment entombed Mrs Sparkler’s hand: wrist, bracelet, and all. Where his own hand shrunk to was not made manifest, but it was as remote from Mrs Sparkler’s sense of touch as if he had been a highly meritorious Chelsea Veteran or Greenwich Pensioner. Thoroughly convinced, as he went out of the room, that it was the longest day that ever did come to an end at last, and that there was never a woman, not wholly devoid of personal attractions, so worn out by idiotic and lumpish people, Fanny passed into the balcony for a breath of air. Waters of vexation filled her eyes; and they had the effect of making the famous Mr Merdle, in going down the street, appear to leap, and waltz, and gyrate, as if he were possessed by several devils.
Merdle, the stolid, coarse and commonplace, is actually going to the warm-baths to sever his jugular vein. For the victorious and bored Fanny, who – pure untroubled selfhood – is Little Dorrit’s antithesis, he has no real existence, indebted to him as she is (having captured his stepson) for her existence in the highest stratum of Society. And he is an essential nullity. But the empty, credulous and conscienceless self-interest (which serves nothing real) of Society has made him a force for evil, in working which he has achieved disaster for himself. The significance of what Fanny sees is for us – who see both what she sees and her. That the last sentence of the passage portends something sinister and disastrous we know without reflecting. And Fanny is one among the multitude to whom the great financier’s suicide will announce ruin.
It is time to say something about the aspect of Victorian civilization that Merdle stands for, the part he plays in Dickens’s critique, and the bearing it has on the essential communication of Little Dorrit. The Merdle ethos is significantly different from the Calvinistic commercialism of the decaying Clennam house The financier has no touch of Calvinism; he is cultivated by the best people, lives in a fashionable quarter, and has as much access to the most exclusive drawing-rooms and dining-tables as he cares to enjoy. But, for reasons that come out in an acid exchange with his wife (Book the First, chapter XXXIII), there is for him very little enjoyment. I quote from that exchange, however, with my eye primarily on the theme of nothingness, which presses itself on us yet again as we contemplate the nature of his relations with Society.
Merdle – Dickens, it seems relevant to remark, was familiar with demotic French – acquired the freedom of Society when the widowed Mrs Sparkler became Mrs Merdle. She, in what we take as a representative tête-à-tête, tells him that he is unfit for Society, and that there is a positive vulgarity in carrying his affairs about with him as he does.
‘How do I carry them about, Mrs Merdle?’ asked Mr Merdle.
‘How do you carry them about?’ said Mrs Merdle. ‘Look at yourself in the glass.’
Mr Merdle involuntarily raised his eyes in the direction of the nearest mirror, and asked, with a slow determination of his turbid blood to his temples, whether a man was to be called to account for his digestion?
‘You have a physician,’ said Mrs Merdle.
‘He does me no good,’ said Mr Merdle.
Mrs Merdle changed her ground.
‘Besides,’ said she, ‘your digestion is nonsense. I don’t speak of your digestion. I speak of your manner.’
‘Mrs Merdle,’ returned her husband, ‘I look to you for that. You supply manner, and I supply money.’
Society itself – Mrs Merdle – couldn’t quarrel with this summary, which answers to the implicit contract between itself and Merdle. The comment on it is the wonderful chapter (Book the Second, chapter XXV) that ensues on Fanny’s loan of the tortoise-shell penknife. There is a dinner at Physician’s, attended by the most illustrious company; and no one – not even his wife – is troubled by the fact that there is a vacancy in the place at table where Merdle should have been. The only difference the absence makes is that the guests are freer to whisper their questions and speculations about the honour – a peerage? – that is going to be conferred on the great public benefactor.
The guests depart, Physician hands Mrs Merdle to her carriage, sends (characteristically) the servants to bed, and settles down to read in his study. A ring of the door-bell takes him down to the door, and the upshot is that he hurries round to the warm baths.
There was a bath in that corner, from which the water had been hastily drained off. Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus, with a hurried drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features. A skylight had been opened to release the steam with which the room had been
filled; but it hung, condensed into waterdrops, heavily upon the walls, and heavily upon the face and figure in the bath. The room was still hot, and the marble of the bath still warm; but, the face and figure were clammy to the touch. The white marble at the bottom of the bath was veined a dreadful red. On the ledge at the side, were an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife–soiled, but not with ink.
Physician doesn’t question that it’s his duty to break the news to Merdle’s wife. He hurries round to Wimpole Street, and after much rousing of flunkeys succeeds in getting the Chief Butler summoned.
At last that noble creature came into the dining-room in a flannel gown and list shoes, but with his cravat on, and a Chief Butler all over. It was morning now. Physician had opened the shutters of one window while waiting, that he might see the light.
‘Mrs Merdle’s maid must be called, and told to get Mrs Merdle up, and prepare her as gently as she can to see me. I have dreadful news to break to her.’
Thus Physician to the Chief Butler. The latter, who had a candle in his hand, called his man to take it away. Then he approached the window with dignity, looking on at Physician’s news exactly as he had looked on at the dinners in that very room.
‘Mr Merdle is dead.’
‘I should wish,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘to give a month’s notice.’
‘Mr Merdle has destroyed himself.’
‘Sir,’ said the Chief Butler, ‘that is very unpleasant to the feelings of one in my position, as calculated to awaken prejudice, and I should wish to leave immediately.’
‘If you are not shocked, are you not surprised, man?’
The Chief Butler, erect and calm, replied in these memorable words. ‘Sir, Mr Merdle never was the gentleman, and no ungentlemanly act on Mr Merdle’s part would surprise me. Is there anybody else I can send to you, or any other directions I can give before I leave, respecting what you would wish to be done?’
The Chief Butler is not a less apt representative of Society than Mrs General. The difference between his attitude to Merdle and Mrs Merdle’s is that he is less directly involved in the contract, and not at all involved in the discomfort caused by the suicide. He took the post for the wages; he was appointed to maintain the standards of civilization; he has done so to perfection and is doing so in his reply to Physician.
The episode of the Chief Butler might properly be called satiric in its irony. Actually it is horrifying, and we are not permitted the detachment that ‘satiric’ tends to suggest. The whole chapter engages us profoundly and the dominant tone is tragic. It is not for nothing that the presiding, and (for us) determining, consciousness in the chapter is Physician’s, of whom we are told – and feel: ‘Where he was, something real was.’ In fact, the inclusive mode in which Dickens has composed the chapter is one that engages the full profound sense of reality generated in us by what has gone before in the book. We don’t, then, take pleasure of any kind in constating the Chief Butler’s utter human indifference – his nullity of the pure unqualified selfhood. What we do take in, and take in with horror, is the revealed nothingness of both terms of the Merdle contract – ‘manner’ and ‘money’. With horror, because Merdle’s death is a real death, and figures for us in immediacy (whether we say so to ourselves or not) the disaster brought upon innumerable real lives by the collusive perversity that created him – a collaborative illusion, but an illusion hiding realities fraught with destruction. So what we are made to contemplate is not only little Paul Dombey’s question (which is more than a question): ‘What can money do?’ We have the disturbing demonstration, under the head of ‘money’, of realities that, lightly treated, may vindicate themselves grimly at the expense of Society itself.
We may feel that we needn’t worry about Society (though the complex Dorrit situation, with its sensitive filaments, puts difficulties in the way of making more than a fleeting satisfaction of that response). But the Dickensian genius leaves us vividly realizing that the red-stained bath signals a large human disaster for society with a small s, entailing real and immeasurable human suffering.
The chapter containing Mrs Merdle’s arch aplomb in the face of questions about her husband’s imminent honour and the Chief Butler’s classical replies to Physician ends with this:
So, the talk, lashed louder and higher by confirmation on confirmation, and by edition after edition of the evening papers, settled into such a roar when night came, as might have brought one to believe that a solitary watcher on the gallery above the Dome of St Paul’s would have perceived the night air to be laden with a heavy muttering of the name of Merdle, coupled with every form of execration.
For, by that time it was known that the late Mr Merdle’s complaint had been, simply, Forgery and Robbery. He, the uncouth object of such wide-spread adulation, the sitter at great men’s feasts, the roc’s egg of great ladies’ assemblies, the subduer of exclusiveness, the leveller of pride, the patron of patrons, the bargain-driver with a Minister for Lordships of the Circumlocution Office, the recipient of more acknowledgments within ten or fifteen years, at the most, than had been bestowed in England upon all peaceful benefactors, and upon all the leaders of all the Arts and Sciences, with all their work to testify for them, during two centuries at least – he, the shining wonder, the new constellation to be followed by the wise men bringing gifts, until it stopped over certain carrion at the bottom of a bath and disappeared – was simply the greatest Forger and the greatest Thief that ever cheated the gallows.
It is impossible to discuss Amy Dorrit as disinterestedness (and the creative nisus that placed her at the centre of Little Dorrit is intrinsically normative) without being brought to an explicit recognition that the disinterested individual life, the creative identity, is of its nature a responsibility towards what can’t be possessed. As Daniel Doyce knows, and testifies in the utterance I have quoted,27 the creative originality in him, though it entails resolution and sustained effort, isn’t his: he is the focus and devoted agent. And I will permit myself here to quote once again from that place in the opening of The Rainbow which I have found frequently an apt locus classicus – the place where we are told of Tom Brangwen that ‘he knew he did not belong to himself’.
The implicit insistence is everywhere in Little Dorrit. The rise, in such a distinctively resuming and concentrating chapter as I have been adducing, to the close I have quoted is not a mere exhibition of accomplished rhetoric on the part of a practised popular writer. The reference to St Paul’s is not just convention. It invokes institutional religion, of course, but not in the spirit of satiric irony. The institutional is invoked as representing something more than institution; as representing a reality of the spirit, a testimony, a reality of experience, that, although it is a reality of the individual experience or not one at all, is more than merely personal. That the appeal is to the living cultural heritage which has its life here and now, and is kept living as a language is, becomes manifest as we move through that last paragraph of the chapter to the end. The inherited totality of the values, the promptings, the intuitions of basic, human need, that both ‘manner’ and ‘money’, in their lethal way, have no use for – that is what is being evoked. The reader who really reads Dickens will hardly feel that there is anything of rhetorical indelicacy in the overtly associating reference to the New Testament theme. The effect of it is to emphasize how essentially the spiritual, in what no one could fail to recognize as a religious sense, is involved in the whole evocation. How Dickens would have replied to theologically Christian questioning who can say? And who would think that, in the context of the present discussion, there could be much point in speculating? The value of Dickens’s vindication of the spirit lies in its being a great artist’s – as Blake’s is; and that kind of vindication has a peculiar importance for us today.
VII
The implicit insistence I have spoken of is what those who talk of Dickens’s bourgeois and unspiritual conventionality clearly miss – though it is inseparable from what
makes him major. It takes many forms. We can point to it again and again in his prose. The astonishing life of language that characterizes his work – the infinitely varied power of his prose, and its vividness of imaginative evocation – manifests itself in ways that anyone would call poetic in those passages which evoke décor. But of course it is never any more mere evocation of décor than what we have in the opening of Hamlet is that. Consider the arrival of the Dorrit family at the convent of the Great St Bernard, with the whole dazed, awed and subdued party.
What has awed and subdued them has been almost as present to us as if we had ourselves been with the caravan. The daunting Alpine transcendence, the changing light, the known factual remoteness that is contradicted by appearance, the ethereal that is known by the evidence of the near at hand to be in fact inimically rugged, forbidding and massive, the de-realizing effect of the strange and shifting reality – the prose that evokes all this has certainly the Romantic poets behind it. But there would be no more point in calling this art ‘romantic’ than in calling Lawrence’s that in St Mawr (and the Dickensian genius in this vein is as marvellous as the comparable Lawrentian).